Marco Stone Quit Smoking Cold Turkey on Ash Wednesday After 12 Years

I smoked my last cigarette at 11:47 PM on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, 2025. I know the exact time because I checked my phone right before I lit it. I was standing on the back steps of my apartment on East Riverside in Austin, and I told myself: this is the last one. I’d said that before. Probably a hundred times. But something about the date, the fact that Lent started at midnight, made it feel different. Like there was a line in the sand that I hadn’t drawn myself.

My name’s Marco Stone. I’m thirty-five. I smoked for twelve years, starting when I was twenty-two, and I’ve been smoke-free for thirteen months.

How It Started

I grew up Catholic in San Antonio. My family’s from there going back three generations. I went to Mass every Sunday until I graduated high school, then I moved to Austin for college and stopped going. Not because I lost my faith exactly, but because I lost the structure around it. No one was waking me up on Sunday mornings anymore.

I started smoking the summer after I turned twenty-two. I’d just dropped out of UT after three years because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to major in and my financial aid was running out. I was working at a barbecue restaurant on South Lamar, busing tables and doing prep work. Everyone on staff smoked. It was the thing that got you a five-minute break. Non-smokers just kept working. Smokers got to step out back, lean against the dumpster enclosure, and breathe for a minute.

I started with American Spirits because that’s what the pit cook, a guy named Travis, smoked. He said they were “natural” and “additive-free,” like that made them healthy. I bought that line for about three years before admitting to myself that I was addicted to the nicotine regardless of what else was or wasn’t in the tobacco.

By twenty-five I was smoking a pack a day. Yellows, the light blue pack. I’d graduated from bumming to buying to needing. The progression was predictable and I watched it happen in slow motion without doing anything to stop it.

Two Attempts, Two Failures

I tried to quit twice before Ash Wednesday.

The first time was in 2019. I was twenty-eight. My girlfriend at the time, Sara, was a non-smoker and she hated it. She never gave me ultimatums but I could see the way she’d turn her face when I tried to kiss her after a cigarette. I tried cold turkey for her. Made it nine days. On day ten I was stuck in traffic on I-35 for over an hour because of construction and something in me just broke. I drove to a gas station and bought a pack. Sara found it in my glove box a week later. We broke up two months after that, for other reasons, but the smoking thing didn’t help.

The second time was in 2022. I tried nicotine gum, the Nicorette 4mg ones. The flavor was awful, like biting into a battery wrapped in mint. My jaw ached from chewing it. And I kept cheating. I’d chew a piece of gum and then smoke a cigarette on top of it. I was getting more nicotine than before, not less. I stopped buying the gum after three weeks and just went back to smoking full-time.

After that second failure, I stopped trying. I told myself I’d quit when I was ready, and that I just wasn’t ready yet. That’s a comfortable lie. Being “not ready” is just another way of saying you’re scared.

Why Ash Wednesday

I started going back to church in 2023. Not every Sunday, but maybe twice a month. I found a parish in East Austin, St. Julia’s, that had a younger crowd and didn’t feel like going back in time. The priest, Father David, gave homilies that actually connected to real life. I felt something shift. Not dramatic. Just a slow pulling back toward something I’d walked away from.

Lent had always meant something to me as a kid. Giving something up. Sacrifice that’s supposed to mean something. When I was little I gave up candy, soda, video games. Kid stuff. But the idea behind it, choosing to let go of something you want because letting go has value, that stuck with me even during the years I wasn’t practicing.

In early 2025, I was thirty-four, I’d been smoking for twelve years, and I was starting to feel it physically. I was winded going up two flights of stairs to my apartment. I had a cough that wouldn’t go away from November through February. My teeth were yellowing despite brushing twice a day. My fingers smelled like smoke no matter how many times I washed them.

I was sitting in Mass on the Sunday before Lent and Father David was talking about what it means to give up something that has a hold on you. Not just chocolate or Netflix. Something that owns a piece of you. He didn’t say cigarettes. He didn’t have to.

I decided that night. Ash Wednesday would be my quit date. Not because I thought God would do the quitting for me. I’m not naive about how this works. Nicotine addiction doesn’t care about your theology. But the structure of it, the forty days, the community of people all choosing to sacrifice something, the idea that suffering through something hard can have meaning, that gave me a framework I didn’t have the first two times.

The First Forty Days

Day one was hard but not the hardest. The Ash Wednesday service itself helped. I went in the morning before work. The ashes on my forehead felt like a reminder I was carrying with me all day. Every time I wanted a cigarette, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror or a window and saw the cross and thought: not today.

Days two through four were the worst physically. This is where cold turkey earns its name. Headaches that started behind my eyes and spread to the base of my skull. Irritability that made me want to snap at everyone. My hands were restless. I work as a freelance web developer, so I sit at a computer all day, and I kept catching myself reaching toward my pocket for a pack that wasn’t there. My concentration was destroyed. Code I could normally write in thirty minutes took two hours because I couldn’t hold a thought.

I drank a ridiculous amount of water those first days. And I chewed on toothpicks. And I did pushups in my apartment whenever the craving got really bad. Drop down, knock out ten or fifteen, and the physical exertion would scramble the craving signal just enough to get past it.

Day seven I went to confession. I don’t normally go, maybe twice a year, but I felt like I needed to say out loud what I was doing and why. I told the priest I was quitting smoking and that I was doing it as a Lenten sacrifice but also because I was tired of being controlled by something I put in my mouth and set on fire. He didn’t say much. He told me to pray when the cravings came and that God doesn’t promise easy, He promises possible.

The Hardest Moment

Day twenty-three. A Friday night. My buddy Carlos invited me to a show at Mohawk on Red River. I’d been avoiding bars and live music because those were prime smoking environments for me. But I’d been cooped up for three weeks and I was going stir-crazy.

The band was great. The crowd was packed. And standing outside in the smoking patio between sets, surrounded by people lighting up, the smell of it was everywhere. It wasn’t disgusting to me. That’s what people don’t tell you. For a long time after quitting, the smell of a freshly lit cigarette still smells good. It smells like relief and ritual and everything your brain associates with that five-minute escape.

A girl standing next to me offered me one. A yellow American Spirit. My old brand. She was just being friendly. She had no idea what that offer meant in that moment.

I said no thanks. But I stood there for another thirty seconds smelling it and I could feel my willpower bending. I texted Carlos that I was leaving and I walked to my car and sat there with the windows up and my fists on the steering wheel until the craving passed. Took about ten minutes. Longest ten minutes of the whole process.

Life After the Forty Days

Lent ended. Easter came. I was still not smoking. And here’s the thing nobody warned me about: the forty days were almost easier than what came after, because during Lent I had a structure. A timer. A community of people giving things up. Once Easter hit, there was no external framework anymore. It was just me and my decision, indefinitely.

That’s when I joined a support group. Not through the church, through the Austin-Travis County health department. They run free quit smoking support groups at several locations. I went to one at a community center on Oltorf Street every Wednesday evening for about three months. Different vibe than church but the same basic idea: people sitting in a room being honest about something hard.

The cravings dropped significantly after the first three months. They didn’t disappear. I still got hit with them, usually triggered by stress, alcohol, or being around other smokers. But they went from a ten-minute wrestling match to a thirty-second flash. A flicker instead of a fire.

What Thirteen Months Looks Like

I can breathe. That’s the headline. The cough is gone. It disappeared around month two and hasn’t come back. I can run. I started running in June 2025, just easy jogs on the Town Lake trail. I did my first full 5K in October. Nothing competitive. I just wanted to prove to myself that my lungs could handle it. They could.

I’ve saved somewhere around $4,000. American Spirits aren’t cheap. I was paying about ten bucks a pack here in Austin. That money went toward paying off my credit card and buying a decent road bike.

My apartment doesn’t smell anymore. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I deep-cleaned everything after quitting and then came home a week later and noticed the difference. The walls, the curtains, the couch, everything had absorbed years of smoke. I steam-cleaned what I could and threw away what I couldn’t. Starting fresh.

I’m dating someone new. Her name’s Michelle. She’s never smoked a cigarette in her life. She said she can’t even imagine me as a smoker. That’s a strange and wonderful thing to hear.

To You, If You’re Still Lighting Up

I don’t know your situation. I don’t know if you’re Catholic or religious at all. The Ash Wednesday thing was specific to me, to my history, to what I needed to make it work. But the principle underneath it applies to everyone: find something bigger than your craving to tie your decision to. A date that means something. A person. A goal. A version of yourself you haven’t met yet. The craving is loud, and if the only thing opposing it is willpower, willpower will lose eventually. It needs backup.

Cold turkey is brutal. I won’t sugarcoat that. If you’ve tried it and failed, that’s not weakness. Your brain is fighting against you because nicotine rewired it to need something that’s killing you. That’s a rigged game. Losing a rigged game doesn’t make you a failure.

But you can win it. I did, and I’m not special. I’m a college dropout who works from his apartment in Austin and smoked for twelve years. If that guy can quit, so can you.

You’re not alone. There are millions of us out here, former smokers who thought we’d never be able to say “former.” We’re proof that the word “never” doesn’t apply to this. It’s hard. It’s worth it. And there’s a version of your life on the other side of the last cigarette that you can’t even imagine yet.

Start there.